


to wait upon your heart

by stepquietly



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 10:53:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4260600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stepquietly/pseuds/stepquietly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma does not know the name she would put to this thing between them, but, if pressed, she might term it solace. They are, the both of them, so very alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to wait upon your heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [paperclipbitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/gifts).



The rooms when she arrives in Venice have to be changed. Arabella and her new friends are kind in accommodating her briefly while she locates a residence of her own, installs it with staff and suits it to her needs, but their inclusion of washing bowls and mirrors in her room cannot be borne.

“Please,” she finds herself saying, and Arabella looks chagrined as she directs them to be removed next door.

She apologises, “Forgive me, Lady Pole. I had not thought –” and Emma understands, perhaps for the first time, how different their experiences of faerie must have been for this not to have been Arabella’s first thought.

“There is no need for apologies,” she says, exhausted. “I am tired of apologies.”

Arabella pauses, and then regains her poise. “I can only imagine,” she offers, gesturing at the luggage Sir Walter has sent with her, the finery of her new dresses, and Emma feels a smile finally tug at her cheek.

“Indeed,” she says, perfect understanding between them.

* * *

Sad as it is, this perfect understanding does not last. Miss Greysteel is only too happy to regale her with stories of the Strange’s tragic romance and Emma is caught between the understanding that her friend desperately wishes contact with her husband, even if he is to be in faerie, and her own terror at the thought of that place.

Bells and mirrors are the things of nightmares now, and she cannot help but think, as she watches Arabella stare into any body of water available, that magicians are their own curse. Arabella is trapped as much by the love of her husband as she ever was by her abduction.

It is a horror to see. Much as she loves her friend and wishes to help, it is imperative that she should leave for her own residence as soon as she possibly can.

She chooses a house as modern as possible in one of Venice’s less fashionable neighbourhoods to ensure that it might come with less history. Its small garden will be left to lie untouched – in fact, she would have preferred no garden at all – except that all the wood of the doors and windows have been worked with iron and that, she is told, is its own protection.

No mirrors are brought into the house. And though she can do nothing about the bells that toll from the church, time is never signalled in her house with bells.

Her new staff is small; a butler, a maid, and a cook, barely acceptable by society’s standards. It is her fervent hope that these actions will be enough to keep all but the most curious of society’s gossipmongers far away. The rest she will simply refuse.

She is so busy with all of these preparations that she forgets how very stubborn Arabella is, had to be, to become her friend at all. If she had remembered, she would not have left her alone with no one but Miss Greysteel and a father desperate to please his wayward daughter.

In a sense, it seems inevitable that she should come to call upon their house only to find Arabella standing in front of a mirror, a lit candle in one hand and Stephen waiting on the other side.

The air feels sucked out of her lungs, the room immediately too cold. “ _Stephen_.”

“Stephen?” Arabella blurts in confusion, but Emma ignores her.

The look he turns on Emma is unfamiliar, something altered in the lines of his face and about his eyes. “Lady Pole,” he acknowledges gravely. “I had not expected you to summon me.”

She rights herself from where she’d cringed instinctively against the door. “I have not,” she says, her voice uneven. “Are you trapped in there? _Mrs Strange, what have you done_?”

“I have done nothing! I simply used what I remembered of Jonathan’s notes to summon –” Arabella stops abruptly, then turns back to the mirror where Stephen is and seems to gird herself.

“You are the King of Lost-Hope now? You have the power to find my husband?” Her voice does not shake even for a second.

If Emma were not fighting the urge to scream, she would pity her this thoughtlessness. As it is, she cannot do more than think the Stranges a fitting pair of fools.

“I am and I do, my lady.” Stephen’s voice is calm, and Emma looks up to find him watching her, even as he directs his next words at Arabella. “Though I do not think I can help you.”

“Oh, Stephen,” Emma whispers, her hands flying to her mouth.

He bends slightly, a courtesy. “Do not concern yourself, my lady. I have simply taken my freedom.”

Emma shakes her head, uncomprehending. “But you are trapped there.”

“Yet less trapped than I was in England.” He straightens slowly. “I am the King of Lost Hope now. I am no man’s slave.” Looking at Arabella, he says, regretful. “I will not bargain with you, my lady. And so I cannot help you.”

Arabella waves this away. “If not a bargain then simply tell me this: do my husband and the possibility of his return exist?”

He nods, slow and grave. “Perhaps.”

“That is all I wished to know,” Arabella says. “Thank you, Stephen,” and blows out the candle.

Stephen disappears and the eerie silence that had covered the room seems to lift. Sounds from outside the doors and windows filter in once more, and the mirror reflects only Arabella’s pale face and the smoke of the candle as she sinks to her knees and drops the candle to cover her mouth. Her hands muffle the noise she makes as she weeps and rocks.

Emma fights her instinctive revulsion of the mirror, the phantom soreness in her limbs and the very real trembling of her knees, to hurry forward and sink beside Arabella.

Arabella refuses her support, climbing to her feet and wiping her eyes. “Don’t worry. I’m not fool enough to summon a faerie and make a deal. I believe we’ve learned that lesson well enough. I just,” she looks at Emma with a plea in her eyes, “I needed to know how impossible my hope was. I had to _know_.”

Emma slowly gets to her feet. She tries to find some response in her to that plea for understanding and finds herself hollow.

“I cannot help you in this,” she says instead, because that is only the truth. She has come too far to be dragged back into faerie and magic, paid too high a price already. Not even for her friend will she risk her freedom. Just the thought of it is enough to clench her stomach with dread.

Arabella nods. “I know. But I cannot give up on Jonathan. He will find his way back to me, or I will find mine to him.”

Emma nods but does not understand. “I cannot help you with this,” she repeats instead, and leaves.

* * *

The days that follow are strange. Her favourite broach that went missing during her voyage to Venice is suddenly found amongst the weeds of the garden. Her tea begins to taste of lemon even though her staff has yet to learn that she cares for it that way. The weather is always clear if she goes outside, even if rain has threatened all day.

She feels sometimes as though someone is watching her, though this is hardly unusual as she is a curiosity in Venice amidst the ever present rumours of her “magical condition.” But this somehow feels less furtive and more steady, a quiet solicitousness that she remembers, as though Stephen were still a part of her world.

It is a safer thought than any of the alternatives.

Magicians all across England currently acknowledge that the barriers between the worlds are as thin as they’ve ever been, possibly almost as thin as the time of the Raven King, and this has sparked a flurry of answering claims across Europe and the colonies. Magic is increasingly an everyday condition and magicians are emerging everywhere, amongst all the classes, all endlessly eager to learn what their talent might mean.

Emma ignores them as best she can and refuses all the invitations she receives, save for those from the Greysteels. They, at least, will not speak of her torment with pity, which is a kindness she has learned not to take for granted yet in her independence.

And it is not that she feels alone and lost in this crowded new city, because she has known worse, far worse, but even in Lost Hope she had Stephen whose eyes she could meet mutely and feel understood. Here she has no one and Arabella is by turns resolved and desperate, both her comfort and her greatest fear.

It is not the life she had envisioned when she took her freedom. But, she thinks grimly, it is totally and utterly hers, and that makes it more precious than any she might have had in captivity.

Let magic come. She has nothing to fear. She will never let anyone bargain her away again.

* * *

It is nearly a month after Arabella’s summoning that Emma wakes in the middle of the night, jarred from a dream where the gentleman with the thistledown hair called her his pearl and spun her senseless. The sheets are disarrayed, half on the floor, evidence of her sleeping struggle.

She has woken from more than one such dream then, and she wakes from them now, and though all rationality suggests that she is free and will never be forced to return to Lost Hope, the terror of not knowing whether or not she was taken that night itself remains. Faeries care so little for such mortal concerns as rationality.

When the trembling has ceased, she gathers her wrap and roams the house she is slowly growing accustomed to, reminding herself that it is hers and safe.

She sees him as she passes an open window – Stephen, alone, standing in her garden.

Perhaps it is his stillness, or perhaps it is that he remains the only one to know the true depth of her suffering, but she finds she cannot merely leave him outside. He has suffered as she has, and now that they are both finally free, with their lives in their own hands, surely he would not be so cruel as to take that from her.

No, she does not think he would take that from her.

“Stephen,” she greets, and opens her doors. She will not invite him in; that is a step too far.

“Lady Pole,” he greets her solemnly, sketching a small bow, ever the perfect gentleman’s man. Now ever the perfect gentleman.

She finds herself at a loss on how to proceed. She studies him as he takes in the state of the garden, the walls of the kitchen beyond her, noting how the odd otherworldliness that is now a part of Stephen seems almost magnified against the edges of the garden. His clothes are much the same style as they always were, though she sees now the gleam of silk and satin in its dark edges, refinements he must have wished for, perhaps refinements he had longed for all this time. His hair is still bound back in its queue.

“Forgive me,” he says, ever courteous, something careful and powerful in the sound of his voice against the silence. It is as familiar as it ever was. “I did not mean to intrude.”

Emma finds it in herself to smile briefly. “You have not intruded,” she says, hiding her nerves. “I know you would not harm me.” It is at once question and statement.

Stephen nods slowly and crosses his arms behind his back. He looks briefly at a loss, as confused by she at this new development. “I merely wished to see how you were faring, my lady,” he offers.

“I am well,” she responds, reflexive now after months of having to defend the sanity of her mind from both Sir Walter’s stuttering incomprehension of her desire to leave him and society’s gossips who believe her new independence to still be the curse. “I have my independence.”

He nods in acknowledgement and turns as if to leave.

“And you, Stephen?” she rushes to ask, something in her refusing to let him leave without confirming his own state. “How do you fare in Lost Hope?”

“I am King,” he says simply, and vanishes.

* * *

It is the start of what cannot precisely be called a friendship. Stephen does not come often; at most she may see him once a fortnight. He never knocks or intrudes, and if her sleep were not so constantly beset by dreams she might never know that he waits in her garden.

Emma does not know the name she would put to this thing between them, but, if pressed, she might term it solace. They are, the both of them, so very alone.

* * *

“What do you do as King of Lost Hope?” she asks one night, standing inside of her threshold.

Stephen sighs. “There is little to do. My role appears as that of any king, merely to exist while others act for me.”

It feels as though the question has been trembling on the edge of her tongue for as long as he has been visiting her. “Do you arrange any dances then?” For a second she almost remembers the heavy feels of the silks, the weight of the finery she had been forced to wear night after night.

He shakes his head wearily. “I am not inclined to dance, my lady.”

“Good.” The breath rushes out of her. “That is good, Stephen.”

He looks away to where the ravens are gathering on the edges of her neighbour’s gutters to watch them converse.

“It was not something Lord Pole felt I needed to learn,” he says, softly resigned. “And so it is not something I have ever been invited to do. I imagine I will not experience it now that there will be no more dances in Lost Hope.”

Emma swallows, somehow taken off guard. The Stephen she’d known would once have dissembled, not given her this honesty.

“I do not know what to say,” she says eventually, once the silence has grown too long for comfort.

Some of the ravens caw and jostle each other, and the night air suddenly chills her despite her wrap.

Stephen looks at her calmly. “There is nothing to be said, my lady.”

* * *

“You seem quiet today,” Arabella says as they stroll through the market.

Emma has joined her and Miss Greysteel for a proposed outing to buy a new parasol. But that is merely a chore that allows them the chance to meet outside of the Greysteel’s residence. Emma has not returned there since the night she saw Arabella first summon Stephen, and though she has probably seen Stephen far more than her friend in the ensuing months, she cannot bring herself to visit there.

Instead, they have taken to meeting for walks or the occasional tea outdoors, each seeking a compromise that will not end this friendship.

Emma appreciates being outdoors and among people, even if she cannot quite bring herself to rejoin polite society yet, and Arabella, as a magical curiosity herself upon her return from faerie is as much a social outcast and object of speculation as she is. Miss Greysteel, by contrast, is merely ruined and thus somehow simultaneously both more and less palatable than the two of them. In some sense, the three of them banding together feels almost inevitable as they walk the streets of Venice.

“Hmmn?” Emma responds, distracted. She has slept little after Stephen’s visit, and even now the memory of it troubles her.

“Are you well, Lady Pole?” Miss Greysteel asks, setting down the parasol she had been engaged in admiring. Emma finds it in herself to nod.

“Yes. Forgive me, my thoughts were elsewhere.” The ache of a sleepless night is both familiar and unsettling under the heat of the outdoors.

She sees Arabella and Miss Greysteel exchange looks and knows almost before they begin what they will say.

To forestall the question, she gives them her answer. “It is not Sir Walter I am thinking of.” Then, seeing Arabella’s troubled look, “Nor am I thinking of the faerie that stole me those nights. I am thinking of Stephen.”

“Ah,” Arabella says, looking disconcerted.

“Stephen?” Miss Greysteel asks, curious.

Emma struggles to find an answer for her. Stephen was her companion but he was so because he was her husband’s servant and at times, her jailer. But then he was her companion in Lost Hope and that was because they were both taken and silenced. He was her friend but that was because he was the only one that understood her suffering, and she his. Now they have both taken their freedom in different realms and none of those old ties bind them to each other. So what are they now to each other?

“Stephen is my friend,” she says slowly, feeling for truth in the words.

She cannot be sure of this, but she does not think they are a lie.

* * *

“Are we friends?” she asks Stephen when she sees him next, determined to confirm this.

There are no ravens watching them this time and the echoing silence that she is growing used to in Stephen’s presence surrounds the two of them. Somewhere outside of this garden, the city continues its business, never quiet, but here it feels like it is simply the two of them.

He startles in the style of a well-trained servant, nowhere but in the edges of his eyes. “I believe so, my lady,” he says, though he sounds as unsure as she feels.

She nods, a resolution heavy in her chest, making her half breathless. It is, she thinks, why her knees tremble now. She steps back from the threshold. “Come in.”

He startles again, more visible this time, then bows and steps indoors, shutting the door behind himself. “Thank you, my lady.”

They both hesitate, unsure how to proceed. Previously Emma would have waited upon her guests in the sitting room and Stephen would have been in charge of procuring refreshments through her husband’s staff. Now Emma, free of her husband, has her own staff who are no doubt deeply asleep, and Stephen is no longer compelled to wait upon her.

Making a decision, Emma says, “I am afraid I cannot provide refreshments, but I believe we will be more comfortable in my sitting room,” and leads the way.

“Of course, my lady,” Stephen murmurs, and follows her.

The sound of their footsteps on the stairs are a reassurance, somehow more familiar than anything else in this house.

* * *

“Do you ever miss England?” she asks another night, curious. She herself finds Venetian society much the same as English society though many would be angered by such a comparison, filled with the same bland politeness that never says a thing.

When particularly tired and angry from the day’s quiet barbs and jabs, she thinks English society might be quite the same as that of the faerie, even if there is not a Christian among them. Virtue seems hardly a concern to any of them.

He looks up from where he has been staring at her tea-tray. The silver on it has not been well polished and Emma makes a note to speak with her butler. How strange that she had barely noticed it until Stephen was here.

“I do not,” he says, grave.

“But it was your home,” she presses, unsure why she insists on a point she herself refuses to hold as a concern.

He looks away, back towards the silver. “It was not my home. I was not born there, nor was I seen as a man there.” He lifts up the spoon as though helpless to stop himself and buffs it against his napkin. His hands are large, the nails curved pink against his skin.

“I do not understand.”

He looks at her and places the perfectly clean spoon back with a clink against the teacup. “I do not miss England,” he repeats. “I could not miss the life I once had, nameless and faceless, another man’s property and not my own.”

She jerks her chin abruptly, feeling laid too bare, and he drops his eyes to the spoon, watches his own hands as he aligns it correctly.

“But,” and he looks at her here, something mutely miserable in his dark eyes, “I find I miss... purpose.”

It sets off an answering ache in her chest. She can feel her lips tremble.

“I understand,” she says, but does not know if she truly does.

* * *

The conversation haunts her. It would be too easy to say that Emma herself misses purpose because that is not the whole of it - without being bargained away by cruel men in search of power, she might have lived her entire life content with her purpose as an Englishwoman in society and marriage. But now, removed from it all, the entirety of the purpose that fuelled her journey to the continent has left her.

She feels adrift, almost outside herself as she watches Arabella discuss a return to Ashfair and her brother. She plans to continue her wait for Mr Strange there, and Emma wishes her well when they speak of it.

Emma would almost envy Arabella her purpose except that to do so would be a horror in itself, and she has not become so very un-Christian as that. But it does leave her feeling very alone.

“If you are in search of purpose, there are many charities here that may benefit from your assistance,” Miss Greysteel suggests. “I would be happy to assist you in your enquiries.”

Mr Greysteel who has accompanied her on their stroll today looks mildly pleased for the first time in Emma’s recollection.

Emma thinks back on the look in Stephen’s eyes, the feeling she has had recently of being wrenched loose from herself. She has not slept well since though it has been nearly a fortnight since she saw him last.

“I would greatly appreciate your assistance,” she tells Miss Greysteel, who claps, excited. It may well be that this will be a welcome change.

* * *

“Purpose is not easy to find,” she informs Stephen bitterly when she opens her door to find him waiting in her garden.

“Indeed, my lady,” he answers blandly. His coat this evening is different, a deep midnight blue that glows against his skin.

She stares at the cut of it against the snow white of his shirt, the paleness of his cravat against his throat, before she spins around and storms to her sitting room, sure after all these months that he will follow her.

When he enters the room, she gestures absently towards a couch with an “if you please,” too filled with annoyance to be seated herself. He seats himself and she paces the room, frustrated.

“They will not let me help, Stephen,” she tells him finally, slumping down into a chair of her own, flushed and impatient. “They believe me tainted by magic.”

Stephen says nothing, seemingly content to watch her.

“I am not tainted,” she insists. “I am _not_.”

“No, my lady,” he says, his voice oddly deep and resonant in that way that she has not heard since she first saw him in the mirror, his eyes fixed on hers, “You are not.”

It startles her enough to have her press a hand to her chest, unable to look away from his eyes. The air feels heavy, like she has to work to draw breath, everything frozen in ringing silence.

“Stephen?” she murmurs, low and confused, as he stands and bows.

“Forgive me, my lady,” he says, and disappears.

* * *

It takes nearly two months for Emma to understand that Stephen may no longer return to her garden, though she has yet to understand the offense she may have caused. She has gone over nearly every word she said but it continues to make no sense to her.

If once she walked her rooms at night because of her dreams, then now she walks them reliving that last conversation with a man she thought was a friend. And her friends are few enough that she feels any loss dearly.

“I do not know what I have done,” she confides in Arabella, having gone so far as to disturb her during packing at the Greysteel’s home.

Arabella glances at her briefly, then continues to arrange her papers into piles.

“What?” Emma thinks she cannot bear not to know.

Arabella sighs and puts down a set of sketches.

“Stephen is magic now, Lady Pole,” she says, gentle but straightforward. “He is King in Lost Hope.”

When Emma continues to stare at her, uncomprehending, Arabella sighs. “You believe magic to be a curse.”

Emma shakes her head against that. “But Stephen is my friend.”

Arabella reaches across the desk to take Emma’s hand, sympathetic. “But he is still magic.”

Emma swallows around this, feeling the words stick like thorns in her throat. Stephen is –

Arabella nods, finally satisfied with whatever she must see on Emma’s face. “Now you understand how I have sometimes felt. And now you know why he left. Perhaps it was his way of wishing you well.”

“He is my friend,” Emma croaks, stubborn, her eyes burning with tears. “It is magic that is the curse.”

“They are the same in this case, Lady Pole,” Arabella says, as gentle as any mother comforting a child.

Emma swallows. “I know.”

The words sound hollow even to her.

* * *

Now that she knows the reason, her sleep is more disturbed than ever. But instead of the gentleman with the thistledown hair taking her hand in the dance, it is Stephen.

Stephen with his hair unpowdered and his coat shining midnight blue, soft under her hands. Stephen whose dark eyes stare into hers and who cannot dance so they remain still as the other faeries in Lost Hope whirl around them.

For the first time that she can remember, the music stops playing and Stephen bows and takes his leave. He walks away and the music begins again, but this time no one asks her to dance. She is afraid. Alone.

It hurtles her to wakefulness, breathless with the sense of something left unsaid, and the feeling takes her from her bed down the stairs and to the garden where the coming winter is beginning to brown the weeds and grass, the stone walls silvering with damp.

She looks until she finds a raven perched on the edge of a tree’s bare branches and calls out, “Please, will you ask Stephen to come?”

The raven startles and begins to fly away, and she can only scream after its figure, “ _Please_.”

“My lady,” Stephen’s voice sounds behind her, and she whirls to see him standing behind her. His coat is silver this evening and she has the oddest sense that if she were to touch it, it would be softer than anything she has felt before.

“Stephen,” she says, and then finds she does not know how to continue. She stares at him as she struggles to find the words, the familiarity of his face, his cheeks, his eyes suddenly grown dear. It is strange how this sentiment has crept upon her, almost without her notice.

She steps closer and squares her shoulders. “I cannot accept magic,” she says boldly, though she finds herself unable to meet his eyes. “And I will never return to Lost Hope.”

“And I will never return to England to be one without power again,” Stephen responds, his tone revealing nothing.

She had known this, deep inside herself. They are forever of two different worlds now.

But still there is a strange sliver of hope that remains in her heart that will not be moved as she recalls Stephen’s visits to her each night, this thing that has grown between them, is still growing, though she has only just realized it. There is the feeling that happiness might be hers, if only she can find a way to take it from the impossible.

If she were to ignore all rational sense.

“I must ask your forgiveness, Stephen,” she says, halting.

He stiffens. “It is hardly necessary, my lady.”

“Indeed it is.” She steps closer and, heart in her throat, rests a hand upon his breast before continuing. “I hurt someone dear to me. Someone I have missed greatly in the time they have been parted from me.”

When she glances up at him, his eyes are stunned. This close she can see the movement of his throat as he swallows, feel the rapid beat of his heart under the soft cloth of his coat. She smiles at him weakly as she insists, voice pitched low, “I must apologise.”

A smile grows on his face and Emma feels her own heart speed to match the beating of his as his hand comes up to cover hers.

“My lady,” he murmurs, low and heartfelt, and Emma understands.

**Author's Note:**

> Me: I really want Stephen/Emma banging.  
> Me: *writes nothing but light angst*  
> Me: This is not what I wanted, self!


End file.
